


The Lake House

by monster_baby



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Depression, F/M, Infidelity, M/M, Slow Build, Supernatural Elements, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-04-21 07:03:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14279583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monster_baby/pseuds/monster_baby
Summary: He could write. The Reynolds document stares back at him in Word, each paragraph carefully constructed in equal parts fury and desperation. At the end, his cursor blinks. There’s nothing else to add, is there?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> unbeta'd.

The house doesn’t sit on the lake. They’d call it the lake house on vacation, carting the cheering kids fifteen minutes through the woods to a small, unkempt pond towards its center (back when they were small enough that Wi-Fi was just another nonsense word and the shimmering stretch of dark water could’ve still been the Atlantic ocean), but ultimately it’s nothing more than a modest cabin stacked with dusty bunk beds and rustic lanterns. Eliza gives it to him in the divorce—gives it to him as if he weren’t the one who purchased it back when everything he’d touched turned to gold—with nary more than a pitying flick of her eyes beside her lawyer. The more he thinks about it, the harder it eats at him; the more certain he is that this was a strategic move, his conniving ex-wife kicking at the legs of his ego until the entire Jenga tower comes tumbling down. (He wants to be furious with her, but it’s hard to find anger beneath the grudging appreciation for just how incredibly smart she is. Best of wives and best of women, indeed.)

Alexander drops his bags with three solid thunks on the hardwood, dust swirling in the beams of light shining through dirty windows. It’s been awhile. Well, it’s been awhile for Eliza and the kids. For him, it’s been an eternity and a half, years, since he’s been able to tear himself from the office long enough to visit. Funny that this is the only place he has left now. Middle of the fucking woods, quarantined away from society, from his kids who won’t answer his calls or texts, and it’s _so fucking funny_ that he stands alone in a room cast with shadows, looking at bunk beds and someone’s pacifier dropped beside the door. He bends to pick it up, twirling it slowly between two fingers. The world feels emptier, somehow, with only remnants of other people left behind.

In the end, he resolves to clean. Alexander kicks and shakes the generator until it finally sputters to life and the cabin glows warm with old lights. The memories are sharper like this. Philip, only three, clambers up and down every piece of furniture he can sink his grabby mitts into, a miniature climbing machine with little Angie crawling eagerly after him. Years later, AJ cries with a wasp sting smack-dab in the center of his knee. That night Eliza, huge stomach against Alexander’s sympathy pudge, sobs into her pillow because she’s sad. No reason, no rhyme. He strokes her hair and rubs her arm, but it’s James hooking his chin over the edge of their mattress, chubby cheeks flushed with tears because when Mama’s sad, he’s sad, that Eliza’s sniffles break into wet laughter.

Alexander dusts the mantle with a wet rag, lifting each picture of his beaming kids, youngest to oldest minus Will, in the forest’s thick silence. There is nothing but gray visions of people here.

He is alone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd.

The silence is monstrous.

No.

No, it isn’t the silence. Cicadas screech outside the insulated windows, crickets chirping and furry animals scurrying through the underbrush to their dens. The night is anything but silent. It’s the stillness that clutches Alexander’s beating heart through his chest and clenches, needle-sharp claws splitting veins and arteries with a precision even fidgeting and pacing the length of the room can’t dispel. For the first time in a long time—he has six kids, for Christ’s sake—there is no clatter of toys and pitter-patter of bare feet on the hardwood; pudgy fingers wiggling at him from beneath the door because Mama said not to bother Papa, but now they  _need_  him with the acute desire that only kids who have been told “no” can experience.

His laptop sits open on the little table near the front window, wire glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. The cabin isn’t quite spotless, but it’s liveable now. He doesn’t sneeze whenever he takes a step forward, and there aren’t any dust storms swirling in the dim lantern light. There’s no need to waste the generator, really, and part of him is waiting for the moment his Macbook dies and he’s left wholly, inescapably, alone with his thoughts. Right now there may not be Wi-Fi, but he can still write. He could write. The Reynolds document stares back at him in Word, each paragraph carefully constructed in equal parts fury and desperation. At the end, his cursor blinks. There’s nothing else to add, is there?

_ I’m sorry, _  he types with one hand, head propped up with the other. Deletes it.

_ I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean— _ except that he did. What use is denial now? He’d meant every last fucking word, and there wasn’t a thing he could say or do that would change that. Finger to the delete key, he watches the words disappear.

_ I didn’t intend to hurt you, _  Alexander tries, but it’s another lie of sorts. Tongue gliding along Maria's wet cunt, he’d thought of Eliza, how furious and heartbroken she’d be if she only knew, if she were home instead of leading the kids alone down to the sparkling pond near the lake house. He’d known it would kill her. But even those thoughts were fleeting, tossed aside to feel Maria clench and squeal around the thick drag of his fingers instead. Intention is meaningless. He deletes the words.

_ I love you, Betsey. _  He stops, considers. Continues.  _I still love you, even now. It eats at me. I wonder if this might be easier medicine to swallow if you weren’t—_ weren’t what? Perfect? Beautiful? Kind? Alexander jams his thumb against the delete key and slams the laptop closed. Self-indulgent bullshit. Self-pitying. What good is that? What fucking pity does he deserve? Even with those thoughts, though, those accusations, he can feel the sad burble of self-deprecation beneath. Woe is me, the absent fucking father he always dreaded becoming. Is it worse, he wonders, to be the man who abandons or the one who  _is_  abandoned? Does the latter even apply to him when he was the one who turned his head first, eyes tracing the lush curve of Maria’s body beneath her skirts?

There’s an odd disconnect in Alexander’s mind between what he should be feeling and what he is feeling, and he isn’t certain whether that speaks on his morals or the monumental four and a half hours of sleep he’s managed to catch within the past two days. It’s like he’s lost. Every direction he turns, he stumbles like a newborn deer over his own feet, alone in the woods with the blood of his marriage sopping his clothes and arms. The crack of the gavel in their final court hearing had been final. Watching Eliza glance at him as she left the room and strode down the wide hall, the click of her black heels her only good-bye, had been final. This, the lake house and his angry kids, are consequences of that finality, but it’s here that he feels like he’s drifting. His family is gone, his job—gone. What is there left? What does Alexander have now to keep him from floating off to sea with Eliza’s steady hands gone from his wrists?

The legs of his chair scrape against the floor when he pushes back from the desk. Outside, the world is dark and black, nothing but the stars and sliver of moonlight trickling down through the trees. His cabin feels smaller for it, flickering lantern light illuminating the modest kitchen and smaller living room-entry way. God, what it must’ve been like to fit everyone inside here the last trip. The kids couldn’t have stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a line without cramming someone—or two someones—against the opposite wall. It’s big enough for Alexander, of course. Two bedrooms, however tiny, are already more than he can use alone. He pushes his glasses into his graying hairline and grinds the heels of his hands against his eyes. Enough with the self-serving pity, for fuck’s sake. Christ.  _Christ_.

(But is it more selfish to wallow when this is a punishment he’s brought upon himself, or is it disrespectful not to give time to mourning the relationship he’d loved but never tended?)

Alexander huffs a sigh through his nose and slides the glasses from his head, flicking each wire arm closed and dropping them onto the space beside his computer. The stillness here can be his recompense, a stark contrast to the confused bumbling of emotion and regret and numb confusion tripping over itself inside his skull, because for all the times he’d locked himself away in his office for work—at his home, where despite the distractions of screeching laughter and pounding footsteps, he could always think more clearly—he’d thrived on movement and the comfortable sound of life tottering on just outside his door. It had made him feel whole, comfortable, noise on the outside to combat the noise on the inside instead of his own voice and thoughts chat, chat, chatting away until even he was sick of himself.

His red-rimmed eyes drift towards the tiny kitchen.

He decides to eat.


	3. Chapter 3

The days pour into nights, and the nights into days. Alexander has never been the type of man to let time slip past his nimble fingers uncounted, but his attention is preoccupied instead with the scrape of tree branches against the roof and suspicious drafts breezing from the seals around the lake house’s windows. That is to say, he can’t seem to focus on much at all. His work had always grounded him. Between sweeping the uneven floors of his mother’s townhome-cum-general store as a boy to serving the president these most recent years, he can’t recall a time—baring illness and brief honeymoon—he hadn’t risen with the sun for work or writing. Now, he doesn’t need to rise. The minutes crash into hours, and there are times when he falls asleep at his tiny desk and others when he spends dark evenings staring at the stretch of black, black ceiling over his bed doing nothing at all.

Dented soup cans and non-perishables still line the small counter where he’d left them the first day, mostly untouched. Looking at them reminds him of the home-cooked meals Eliza would lovingly craft, her cheeks flushing with modest pride when he fawned over her work, the perfect homemaker. He thinks, not for the first time, that he had overestimated her loyalty and underestimated her sense of self-preservation and scowling whispers Angelica had tipped into her ears. Eliza reads precisely none of his texts, each message less wordy than the last. A smart woman. That’s the thing about beauty, though, isn’t it? More than anything, it plays the part of the distractor, the hiss of smoke that floods the magician’s stage while he hides the sawn assistant.

Alexander wonders how long he’ll wallow in bitter pity before something loud and sharp pierces the fog. What is it worth to feel like this, to mope over something as fickle and fleeting as love? He’s loved plenty of people. Plenty. It isn’t that Eliza is different, or that she had changed him in their twenty years together—except that _is_ the reason. Deep beneath the winding sinew and bone, skin flayed apart, he feels like an entirely different man. The question, he supposes, then, is not whether marriage has changed him, but how and why. He rolls sluggishly onto his side and stares dully out the dirty window beside the bed. When the energy finds him again, perhaps he’ll re-arm himself with cleaning supplies and spruce up his prison, but for now he feels as if an invisible illness has taken him.

It persists and lingers and rots him from the inside out like nothing short of a plague. His eyes are red-rimmed from sleeplessness, clothes rumpled, and more than anything he feels furious that with all his effort he can’t quell the soul-deep grief that strikes him again, and again, and again between his ribs and stomach and throat because he _doesn’t love Eliza this much_. She isn’t worth this much, not with all her beauty or money, and he’s one sleepless night short of kicking his feet like a fucking toddler and calling to demand he be allowed to speak with his children. Only the faintest remnants of dignity still his stiff hands. They card instead through his greasy hair, and in the silence of the lake house Alexander suffocates on soundless, seething rage.


	4. Chapter 4

There’s familiarity in the smoky curls of this melancholy fog stuffing Alexander’s head. It doesn’t visit often, medicated and brushed away with irritable flaps of his arms, but he’s reminded of those first few years he’d spent suffering at Columbia.

People don’t talk about culture shock unless they’re visiting remote islands or distant countries, but as religiously as he’d dreamed about New York’s sparkling skyscrapers and bustling sidewalks brimming with strangers from across the world, he’d felt disconnected mere days after his stumbling arrival. Someone—a pastor, maybe—once told him that most people feel that way in the city, so much of its population eager transplants, but the creeping manifestation of these dark shadows in Alexander’s mind, heavier longing for the islands he’d loathed for years, struck him as different breed of non-belonging. It had hovered like a spectre, haunting his heavy steps until even crawling from bed felt like some monumental achievement. No energy to eat, to shower, to cry when every jagged piece of him pointed inwards against vulnerable flesh.

He doesn’t cry now either, and although that might’ve been something of an accomplishment any other day, it introduces itself now as mocking failure instead. The world had presented him with gold-spun opportunities and he’d shredded every last one with his bare teeth like a wild fucking animal; like a ravenous, diseased mutt with no sense of self-preservation or foresight or pacing. Alexander gobbles down every shred of meat dropped in front of his dirty muzzle and saves none for the future, thinks nothing of his starving family shivering in the den he’d stolen from someone else. This isn’t a mistake he can fix with snappy phone calls and silver-tongued witticisms, schmoozing with politicians and bank tellers until the problem evaporates like morning mist. It’s a moral failing, fritzy software installed at his core, and anyone with basic fucking emotions would cry ashamed tears for the realization.

But he doesn’t. Alexander smothers himself against his thin pillow and digs his nails against bare skin with trembling fists, wishing the heat stinging his eyes would just _burst_. This is the definition of uselessness, he thinks nastily. Lying in his unmade bed, curled on himself, but is it genuine guilt that knots in his chest if he can’t summon tears? Is there genuine remorse without sadness? He doesn’t know. He digs feebly through the thickening fog until he reaches gray sludge, this empty swamp catching him at the knees and slicking his sweat-stained clothes with stinking slime; and it feels like nothing, like emptiness, and when he shakes and struggles to turn through the muck and trudge the way he’s come, there’s nothing but swamp behind him, in front of him, on either side; stretches and stretches of sludge thick like grimy cement, climbing his thighs and hips to his chest with each moment he stands still.

It’s almost dawn by the time Alexander drags himself from the mattress. The blankets are bunched towards the headboard, gray fitted sheet rolling up towards the center. It feels disingenuous to call his little nook a bed, but all the components are there, he supposes.

(He ruins most things he touches, but how selfish is that to think when he’s talking about his unmade bed, just another stupid attempt feed the fire of self-pity? How pathetic, fucking pathetic. He can’t spend a single minute these days without making every breath and thought about him, like the world revolves around him, like he actually thinks the ground is crumbling with him at the center. Alexander isn’t worth that. See, that’s the problem with him: self-importance. Ego. Delusions of grandeur. He’d told himself last week to stop sulking around, and what is he still doing?

What is he _still doing_ right this second?)

Grinding the heels of his hands against his blood-shot eyes, he drifts into the kitchen and stands at the counter. The soup cans are still stacked beside him, almost half of them scraped clean even if they haven’t made it into the bin. Tossing them makes him feel precisely nothing, the sense of meagre accomplishment he’d been chasing absent.

He needs to bathe. Breakfast can wait until he’s feeling less disgusting. Alexander doesn’t need to touch his face to know he’s broken out in one or two places, pink-red blemishes that make him feel fourteen and greasy again, and that was saying nothing for his hair or anywhere else. The thing is, though, that he hasn’t taken the time to fuck around with the outdoor shower, and it’s debatable whether he’ll have the energy to play plumber and make himself semi-presentable all in the same day. There’s a weak buzz of energy flickering in sharp starts and stops through his body, internal Magic Eight Ball rattling around and coming up with a resounding _no_ when he considers fixing the shower’s pipes and taking care of himself in the same day.

Alexander leans against the counter, eyes closed, one hand pushing through his hair.

Alright, well…

There’s always the pond.


End file.
